Re: lag spikes

@TRrift you won't be able to change the 2nd hop IP address, that'll be most likely in the exchange and it's a private IP address range - in effect a LAN for your area before all the data gets encapsulated and shipped down London for IP routing.

If you're interested use www . iplocation. net (without the white spaces) to find the rough location of your various hops, as mentioned you won't be able to find the 172 address but all the other IP addresses should be able to be located. You should find they're all scattered around London.

Re: lag spikes

I'm not sure physically where the 172 address is, it's either the road side cabinet or in your telephone exchange, it's a private address range in the same way as 192.168.x.x, these addresses are reserved for internal networks / NAT setups. That's why you won't be able to find the 172 addresses i.e. they're not public / internet facing addresses. How the 172 addresses are wired up is also another mystery, if these are assigned in the road side cabinet then every house might have it's own 172 address ?

You won't be able to ping the 172 addresses only tracert will pick them up.

It's likely if your friend is on the same estate then you'll be connecting via the same road side cabinet, if it was me though I'd find where the road side cabinets are to see if your friend might be connecting via a different cabinet.

It would be interesting if your friend sees a different route to the same destination IP address, anything beyond the 172 address I would expect to be the same.

Re: lag spikes

Edit: if anyone switched ISP can you recommend wich ISP to switch to "Virgin not available" ? it seems Vodafone, Plusnet, Talktalk are all having threads about ping spink whilst streaming any video. Are we gamers in the UK doomed or what ?

Re: lag spikes

Sky would be my No.1 choice, be careful of other ISP offerings many of which are just re-branded BT offerings, I would stay away from Plusnet, Vodaphone, Post office, talk talk (probably several others I can't remember atm). I'm not sure about Zen, I've seen posts suggesting switching to Zen solved their ping problems. Certainly check out the forums for whatever ISP you're switching to, any mentions of ping problems run away real fast and never look back 🙂

Quote from one user "My switch to sky happened a couple of hours ago and no sign of any ping spikes!!!! Multiple device streaming netflix prime youtube and my son on his pc gaming with no ping issues......So glad i switched. Sky is an llu in my exchange and i would have to say yes they use their own core network as traceroutes have far fewer hopps than bt. If anyone plans on switching from bt make sure its to one of the llu providers at your exchange. It worked for me!!!!"

Another user "Finally got rid of BT and onto another ISP and whaddaya know, the problem has disappeared. If you've got the option, I highly recommend it."

Another user "I just finally convinced my landlord to swap us to sky and the problem has gone instantly. Not made better, gone. The night before I couldn't play Dota because my flatmate was watching Netflix, today my ping is steady no matter what. Definitely a bt thing."

Re: lag spikes

yo @dubstepzombie do you mind screenshotting a PingPlotter showing your fixed ping / the possible new route that you're not taking so I can have a comparison to show the OR Fiber Engi when he / she arrives on Monday.

Re: lag spikes

I bet your route will have the same structure in terms of hops, I could be wrong as I've not studied these routes closely enough but I believe there isn't one core network, I think there's several / many all probably with a maximum bandwidth that'll cater for some number of users / perhaps geographic areas. IMO it's the 31 addresses or core network that's bogged down with traffic, hard to tell which. Note the spikes in the ping plotter graph is probably because I was listening to some Tidal music while it was tracing.